[dllthomas]

Wikipedia says: "Depending on the class model used, the middle class constitutes anywhere from 25% to 66% of households."

Fewer than 5% of Americans make more than 250k/yr. So either that is not the cut-off for middle class, or a huge percentage of the former middle class is now lower class.

[fleitz]

It's the middle class, not middle income quintile. It would seem to be pretty ridiculous to me that more than 5-10% of America were doctors, lawyers, etc.

Perhaps in the US it's the middle class includes the working class but in my estimation middle class means you still derive most of your income from working but you own a decent portion of the means of production.

If the middle class means households making 100K then I would estimate that a couple working as tech support and a caregiver are middle class rather than working class.

To me it works like this:

  You derive your income from capital: Upper class
  You work and own a decent portion (5%+ unless public) of your employer: middle class
  You work: working class.

eg. My mom was a phone operator, my dad was a mechanic, they're working class despite making more than $100K inflation adjusted.

[dllthomas]

"It's the middle class, not middle income quintile."

I made no claim to the contrary. But if we are looking at income figures to try and guess class, 1) we're going to be doing a poor job if we're missing at least 4/5 of middle class people, 2) we're going to be talking about something other than what everyone else means when they say middle class, or 3) the situation has changed and it's a recent development that so few people are middle class and the models haven't caught up. If 3, we've either seen tremendous immigration/reproduction in the lower classes (somewhat possible in the small, but a five-fold increase would mean the earlier figures were pre-1900, which is unlikely) or we've seen a lot of people leave the middle class in a downward direction - which doesn't say good things regardless of how well the remaining middle class is doing. If 2, we might be able to have a meaningful discussion but it's likely a different one than most people in the discussion thought we were having. If 1, we should pick better numbers or simply refuse to include income in driving our estimates.

[fleitz]

I think it's an intentional political doublespeak that people who are making a median wage think they are middle class.

Thus policies for the 'middle class' are policies they identify with despite those policies not actually being particularly well suited to their economic situation.

IIRC I believe 90% of Americans think they are middle class, even from a quintile perspective this is probably skewed.

[dllthomas]

The more reasonable "100k+" number that others have cited is still all in the top 20%, so while there may broadly be some inappropriate conflation of "middle class" and "most people" or "median income", that's not most of what's going on here.